The Lawsuit and the

Good of the Company ">
eWEEK.com: What do you think of SCOs recent threats to expand its legal actions?
Love: Im not privy to the information they have. But, its not the path I, or our group, would have gone down. I think Caldera investors who wanted a quick return pressured the management. They seem to think that short-term, possible gains are more important than long term ones, which is unfortunate.

I dont believe that the suit is good for the company or Linux. I do believe IBM has not played clean with SCO. Still, with UnitedLinux they were a tremendous help. But, on the other hand, unlike other Linux companies, Caldera/SCO didnt get IBM investments, and of course, theres always Monterey.

Now, the suit has taken on a life of its own, and theres a lot of posturing for the suit going on that people now believe in. That said, there are many business relationship issues that the open-source community isnt aware of between SCO and IBM. But now its become an ongoing feud between SCO and the open-source community.
I dont know if theres really an intellectual-property case or not. Its possible SCO discovered something that I dont have the information on. I do think, though, that its very unfortunate that what should have been a contract dispute has become an industrywide fight.
eWEEK.com: Why is this is so? Certainly, SCO has been fanning the flames.

Love: Perhaps by proposing to go after Linux end users, they want to put additional pressure to bring matters to a head. But, the way its escalating, Im not sure theyre trying to bring it to a conclusion. SCO may actually believe that theyll drive a business with Unix licensing alone.
eWEEK.com: How do you feel about this?
Love: My belief is that Unix and Linux should co-exist and should look and feel the same to application developers. Fundamentally, I would not have pursued SCOs path.
You see, the challenge is building business. Litigation, no matter what side youre on, tears down businesses. Only the attorneys win. Companies should focus their energies on building their businesses, not on lawsuits. I dont see any positive outcomes.
Its like a fire. Right now in Utah, they started a controlled burn, and its turned into the worse fire of the season. They had been afraid of a lightning strike and then they lit the match.
This is awkward to me, I dont know whats going on inside SCO today, and I dont want to throw stones on either side.
I, however, no longer have any investments in SCO. When news of the IBM lawsuit broke, I sold the last of my stock. I no longer have any relationship with the company.
eWEEK.com: Do you think, even after the Monterey letdown, that SCO could have been successful on the path you would have taken?
Love: It could have been successful. The path we were taking was the only one we could. We didnt have the resources to move Linux to IA-64 on our own, and we couldnt push our SCO Unix customers to Linux.
Had the economy spun around ... Much of our business was with retail sites, and as their businesses got better, ours would have too.
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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is editor at large for Ziff Davis Enterprise. Prior to becoming a technology journalist, Vaughan-Nichols worked at NASA and the Department of Defense on numerous major technological projects. Since then, he's focused on covering the technology and business issues that make a real difference to the people in the industry.